The Favor by Nicholas Guild Page A

He had been careful, so
they didn’t have a thing on him. They couldn’t have. He kept
reminding himself of that consoling fact, over and over. For the
rest, he thought about how much his face hurt, so by the time he
was ready to pay anything like attention to his surroundings they
had lost their novelty.
    The cell was without a window, and they had
confiscated Guinness’s watch, so he had no way of knowing with any
certainty what time it was when they came to get him. One assumed
night—it had been some time ago that a trustee, in a heavy gray
outfit that looked like a suit of pajamas, had brought them little
tin trays of a purplish stew that smelled bad enough to overcome
any curiosity you might have had about how it would taste; Guinness
had given his to the old peasant, who seemed to need fortifying
after his ordeal.
    Anyway, he was beginning to figure out that
time meant very little in a prison. All he knew for sure was that
it was late enough to make him wish they would just let him curl up
somewhere and get some sleep. He hadn’t closed his eyes the night
before—he never could before a job.“Mr. Guinness? Please sit
down.”
    The interrogation room was tiny, perhaps only
half the size of his cell, and there were six uniformed policemen.
Only one of them was seated; he smiled and motioned for Guinness to
take the only other chair, across the table from himself.
    But Guinness remained on his feet. He looked
around at the faces of his captors, from one to the next, trying to
read them, to discover what they wanted, how much they knew, what
they might have guessed. But they all seemed to be wearing masks,
even the one seated at the table, whose smile might have been
painted on for the occasion—perhaps him most of all.
    “I want to talk to someone from my embassy.
And I want a doctor.”
    He brought his fingertips up to the huge
oblong welt which, among other things, had nearly closed his eye
for him. “I don’t know what this is all about, but that thug of
yours could have killed me.”
    And then he sat down. He folded his hands
together and rested his forearms on the tabletop, allowing himself
to hate them. He was exhausted and—yes—frightened, and the inside
of his head felt like it might come leaking out of his ears, but to
hell with them. They had gotten all they were getting.
    After a few hours, they figured that out for
themselves and had him taken back to the cells.This time he had one
all to himself—but he had been expecting that. Two years before,
when he had been going through his training up in Scotland, they
had told him how these sorts of things were done.
    “When they want you to think,” they had said,
“they let you be by yourself. They aren’t being nice—they just
don’t want you to get distracted while you’re imagining what a fix
you’re in. It’s harder to be a hero in a vacuum, and they know
it.”
    Was it the same cell? It could have been—the
same plank bed, the same toilet with the seat removed, the same
white tile walls. He lay down on the bed and glanced casually
around, the back of his head resting on his right hand, trying to
see if he could find anything different, but the light was too dim.
Perhaps that was something different right there.
    They had said they had him cold—that was what
they said. But they wouldn’t even tell him why he’d been arrested.
To hell with them; they were bluffing. They had spent the whole
three hours trying to trick him into betraying himself. They didn’t
have anybody cold.
    “What is your real identity, Mr.
Guinness?”
    “You have my passport—you can read.”
    “Why did you leave the gloves behind?”
    “What gloves?”
    “Who paid you?”
    “For what?”
    “Who sent you here?”
    “I’m a tourist.”
    “What were you doing in that particular
building?”
    “You have the ticket. Talk to the Alitalia
people—ask them what I was doing.”
    He didn’t know anything, he was a tourist
buying space on the flight to Rome,